Still have bugs, still not cycled??

DarkSoul

DarkSoul

Mad Scientist
Mar 12, 2007
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London, Ontario
So lastnight, I did some major cleaning on the tank as it desperatly needed it.

there was plant matter from my hornwort all over the place, as well as some other plant bits, algae of some sort all over the glass, and a serious case of little "Y" shaped bugs .... I think.... I did see one worm looking thing.

I cleaned it out, doing two 60% or so water changes, wiped down the glass, and cleaned out the filter pads, as well as put a new one in with fresh carbon to remove the traces of melafix/pimafix ive been dosing for the last week.

I removed the betta prior to all of this, and added 10ml of ammonium chloride to the tank to test the cycle, which brought the ammonia level up to about 4 or 8ppm.

today I test, and the ammonia is still sky high, So I will need to do more water changes and bring it down so I can put the betta back.

shouldn't my tank be cycled by now? there werent even traces of nitrites or nitrates... only ammonia. and shouldnt that level of ammonia killed any of those bugs living in the tank?

Im so stressed about all of this, the tank doesn't seem to be doing well, and I don't know why.
 
I'm not a pro but IMO, a single betta does not produce a large load of waste in a tank, so only a small colony of bacteria is required to keep the cycle running. But that small bacteria colony is not large enough to deal a 4-8ppm (10ml in your case) ammonia level overnight. I don't think your betta can produce 10ml of ammonia in your tank in a single night! Maybe you could try with a less ammonia in your tank, like .25ppm and see if it goes down, anyways some traces of ammonia must still be present in your tank after your water changes, see if it drops
 
I agree...If all you had in there was a single betta then the tank could have been cycled for that small of a bioload.......But when you added the ammonia the tank wasnt cycled to handle this big of a dose.

You say you dosed it to 4 or 8ppm (a big jump in the two figures) ...Well if you dosed it to 8ppm then you could have very well killed off what bacteria you had as high doses can kill good bacteria off..... This is the reason they say to keep ammonia levels under 6ppm when fishless cycling as anything higher can kill off bacteria and stall the cycle out.

Do several water changes and get the ammonia level to around .25ppm and see if it goes away overnight to see if you have any good bacteria left.
 
yes ive done many water changes now. the ammo level is about 0.25 now.

wtf are these freakin bugs though..... they still survive the high ammonia level, but isnt ammonium chloride "safer" for things in the tank than the ammonia generated from waste?
or is ammonia simply ammonia no matter how its introduced?

what suprises me most, is that my plants didnt seem to consume any of the ammonia either.
 
DarkSoul said:
wtf are these freakin bugs though..... they still survive the high ammonia level, but isnt ammonium chloride "safer" for things in the tank than the ammonia generated from waste?
or is ammonia simply ammonia no matter how its introduced?
Click to expand...
Y-shaped? Or more like a tiny tree? Sounds like hydra to me.

As far as ammonia goes, dissolved in water, it yields an ammonium ion. So you guessed right: it does not matter whether you add ammonia as ammonia or as ammonium chloride.
 
well, from what I am able to actually see, it looks like one little white mass, with two smaller little white masses attatched to the "body"

basically like a body with legs and thats it, they stay mostly on the glass/substrate, but will venture into the water column to get to another surface.
the largest of them, are only slightly larger than a pinhead.
 
not one of those bugs looks like what I have :(
 
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